Belgium is an anomaly, a crazy-quilt of Frenchmen and Dutchmen who call themselves Walloons and Flemings, respectively. I've always liked the country, although I haven't spent much time there since, I believe, 1975, when I drove from Namur to Ostend and took the ferry to Harwich and the train from there to Scotland, where I was then studying.. On the way I stopped in Bruges and Ghent, and remember peerless medieval architecture, chilly autumn streets, quiet canals, excellent "frites" (fries–not French fries, Belgian ones), and of course the world's best beer. As it happens, several of my favorite life enhancers are Belgian, including Duvel ale; Tintin; the painter Magritte; Georges Simenon, creator of the entirely Parisian Maigret; and Jacques Brel, the great balladeer. Brel was a French-speaking Walloon and an inspired poet in French, and he made his career at the Olympia in Paris; but he loved Belgium, and loved it as a whole, and had no time for the silly rifts and discordances between the two principal groups of his homeland. Switzerland, he argued, with its four different linguistic groups living in harmony, was a far better example to the world, and he tried throughout his all-too-brief life (he died in 1978 at 49) to bridge the Walloon-Fleming gap by singing in both French and Dutch (Flemish) of his love for his homeland, notably in the famous ballad "Le Plat Pays" ("The Flat Country"). Alas, he's too long gone. The Walloons and Flemings are further apart than ever. At least we'll always have Tintin–and Duvel.